Dead Ends & Open Roads

She had no name for twenty-nine years. Found in Key West in 1991, buried as a Jane Doe. It took a DNA genealogy match in 2020 to give Wanda Deann Kirkum her name back — and to identify the man who killed her, who had himself been dead for almost thirty years. The season begins at Mile Marker Zero. The end of the road, or the beginning, depending on which direction you're heading.

On a warm Tuesday morning in March 1974, seventeen-year-old Amy Billig stuck out her thumb on South Dixie Highway in Coconut Grove. A van pulled over. She was never seen again. What followed was one of the longest searches in Florida history — thirty-one years, conducted almost entirely by her mother, Susan Billig, who refused to let Miami absorb her daughter the way it absorbs everything else.

Twelve victims pulled from the canals of Broward and Dade counties between 1975 and 1976. For nearly fifty years, most had no names. In 2023 and 2025, DNA genealogy finally named two of them — both fourteen, both from Hollywood. Ten others are still waiting. The host grew up a few blocks from where they were found.

In 2007, three incidents in and around Town Center Mall left two women and a seven-year-old girl dead. The host worked five minutes from that mall. He crossed that parking lot constantly. Joey Bochicchio-Hauser was seven years old. The host's son is five. That math is the episode.

Tammy Lynn Leppert was eighteen, a beauty pageant champion with a small role in Scarface. For a year before she disappeared, she told everyone she'd seen something she wasn't supposed to see. On July 6, 1983, she called her mother from a Cocoa Beach payphone. No answer. Then she walked away.

No tip line. No case number. There are four people in the ground under Interstate 4 near Sanford — a German Catholic family, 1887, killed by yellow fever, buried in unmarked graves, paved over when the state built I-4 in the early 1960s. Their names are lost. For the first time all season, the host cannot say a name.

In 1983, nineteen-year-old Barbara Grams was attacked walking home from her shift at a Tampa restaurant. Robert DuBoise was convicted on discredited bite-mark evidence and spent thirty-seven years in prison. DNA testing in 2020 matched the actual killers. Tampa is the city where the host got married. It's also the city where the justice system failed as completely as it can fail.

The host rode a bus four hours to Gainesville every weekend for two years. Danny Rolling was forty-five miles north the entire time, alive on death row, the case still open. The host was sitting on the Plaza of the Americas eating free Hare Krishna lunch and had no idea.

Christopher Wilder — FBI Ten Most Wanted — abducted Linda Grober from a Tallahassee mall in March 1984. She was twenty-one. She survived. She escaped. She reported everything. Wilder was never charged for what he did to her. This is the only episode this season about someone still here.

The season finale. In January 1974, Athalia Ponsell Lindsley — model, dancer, political activist — was murdered on her porch with a machete in broad daylight. Her neighbor was tried and acquitted. The case has been open fifty years. The season started with a Jane Doe who finally got her name back. It ends with a woman whose name everyone knew, and whose killer walked free anyway.